


Messa Di Voce

by theslovenlyfool



Series: Modulations [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos is a Good Boyfriend, Cecil Has Tattoos, Cecil Might be Human or Inhuman, Cecil is the Distant Prince, M/M, The Distant Prince, Young Cecil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 01:56:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14298225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theslovenlyfool/pseuds/theslovenlyfool
Summary: The man had unmarked skin when he entered the desert.





	Messa Di Voce

The man had unmarked skin when he entered the desert. One night when he was centuries young, the sand called to him and he followed, because he was a man of voices, and voices had never failed him. Until then. 

The man went out into the desert in the middle of the night. Above him, the sky glistened with unexplained lights. Behind him, Night Vale sat in sleepy darkness. The desert was singing to him. Singing a song he didn’t yet know. He loved it despite this, somewhere in his heart, he had been listening to it all his life. 

_“No hace falta que salga la luna. Pa' venirte a cantar mi canción. Ni hace falta que el cielo este lindo. Pa' venir a entregarte mi amo...”_

The man didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but that didn’t prevent his heart from swelling. 

So he followed the desert voices blindly, and found himself lying face up in the middle of the sand, watching the sky shift above him, below him, within him. 

“My name is Cecil and Cecil means blind and I wear glasses to see,” the man sang, allowing said glasses to drift from their normal resting place. He hadn’t had water in a while, and his mind told him that wasn’t good, but his heart was still trying to learn the lyrics to the desert song, and so the man paid no mind. 

When the Creator came for him, the man was not afraid. To be fair, he was barely conscious. The Creator took out a long, rusty knife, and pulled the man out of his shirt. On each arm, the Creator drew three lines with their blade. _“Aqui...Alli...Alla,”_ the Creator muttered with each stroke of his knife. He made the same marks on the man’s chest. The same mark along his back. _“Aqui, alli, alla...Aqui, alli, alla...Aqui, alli, alla.”_ And then the Creator left, and the man never saw him again. 

Josie found him wandering the desert, his skin dark and blistered from the sun, his cuts sweltered and pussy. She brought him to the physician, who did the best he could. For weeks, Cecil did not wake from his fevered dreams. Josie waited with the patience of star formations. 

After thirteen weeks, Cecil Gershwin Palmer woke up. 

His voice was raw, and his scars, while healed, burned him nonetheless. Josie offered him water for his throat, and an apologetic smile for his scars. 

“How’re you feeling, Ceece?” She asked. 

Cecil frowned. “Achey. But, other than that, I’m alright. What happened?” 

Josie shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell us.” 

But Cecil couldn’t. Even after hundreds of years of solitude and thought, after hundreds of years in his radio booth, distantly keeping vigil over his beloved town, he could never remember what happened during his time wandering the desert. 

The scars never faded. They were brutal and choppy, bulged in some places even. Cecil began collecting tattoos. He would never say they were a form of reclaiming his body, but that’s most certainly what they were. He filled his skin with swirling patterns of tentacles and flowers (carnations, anemones, forget-me-nots, poppies). The tentacles, he thought looked cool, and the flowers, he thought, were beautiful (and beautiful things should cover up ugly things, he thought). 

And so it was, by the time Carlos the Scientist came to town, Cecil’s torso was almost completely covered in tattoos. The inhabitants of Night Vale thought nothing of this. Cecil had been around, at that point, for quite some time, and he had had tattoos for as long as most people could remember. And considering what else went on in the town, Cecil’s tattoos were almost banal. 

It was no surprise, thus, that when Cecil ran in to Carlos at the Ralph’s (a few days after Cecil had publicly declared his love for the man on the radio), and when Carlos commented on the elaborateness of his tattoos, that Cecil was shocked. 

“You’re tattoos are very elaborate,” Carlos had said. 

Cecil had been wearing a bright yellow sundress and rainboots that day. His sundress was covered in orange watering cans and his boots were the shape of rainbow ducks. Cecil was used to comments on his clothing from outsiders, but he hadn’t received a single comment about his tattoos in over a century. He stared at Carlos. 

“Uh, yeah...” 

“Are those tentacles?” Carlos asked, squinting at Cecil’s arm. 

Cecil blushed furiously. “Uh, yeah.” 

Carlos, seeming to notice the discomfort of his conversation buddy, withdrew rapidly. “Uh...anyway...sorry for uh...well, see you around.” 

Cecil would remember that moment as the one in which he fell in love with Carlos all over again. There he was, Cecil’s future husband, rushing down the aisle of the Ralph’s in escape, a cart-full of popsicles rattling in his wake. 

Later that evening, as Cecil put away his groceries, he burst into a fit of giggles. “He said he’d see me around!” He muttered, mostly to himself, but also to the Secret Police officer, Margo, and, of course, to the Faceless Old Woman. 

~*~

Years and years into the future, Carlos rested his head on Cecil’s bare chest and traced the art along his skin. “Tell me about your tattoos,” he muttered. 

Cecil shrugged, “There’s not much to tell, I had some scars, I wanted to cover them up.” 

Carlos nodded. He had found the systematic scars running across Cecil’s arms and torso. He had marvelled at the tattoo artist’s ability to cover them so well. They had talked, late into the night, about Cecil’s vacant memories of his wanderings in the desert. But never had they spoken about the tattoos themselves. 

“But why the tentacles and flowers?” Carlos prodded, running his hands through Cecil’s chest hair. 

Cecil lifted his own arm, so that he could see the patterns of his skin. “Poppies for remembrance,” he muttered, tracing a cluster of poppies around his wrist, “forget-me-nots for the same reason,” he chuckled, running his hand along his inner elbow. “Green carnations are the gay flower, so of course I had to have them,” he said, running his hand along his chest, cupping Carlos’ cheek while he was there. “And anemones are protection against evil,” he finished, cupping his neck where a cluster of anemones ran up to his jaw. He had no explanation for the tentacles, only that they had felt right at the time. 

Carlos cupped his cheek. The room fell into a comfortable silence. “You are beautiful,” Carlos finally muttered. 

Cecil smiled, kissing him softly. 

Just before drifting to sleep, Carlos murmured a half-remembered song: _“No se como decir lo que siento, solo sé que te quiero un monton y que a veces me siento poeta y vengo a cantarte mis versos de amor.”_

And Cecil, already asleep, wouldn’t have recognized it, even if he’d been conscious to hear it.


End file.
